Ms. Eisenberg goes to Washington

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, May 2, 1999

While visiting Washington this week, I decided to investigate the federal government's progress in updating itself for the Internet Age. The news is mixed.

While some government functions remain mired in outdated procedures based on tradition, other policy-making bodies and information resources are being opened and made more efficient - not just for D.C. workers, but for the public at large.

First the bad news, then the good.

Visiting the Supreme Court, as I did on Wednesday, is an exercise in ritual without rational basis.

"This is your Supreme Court," claimed the brochure,

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"Visitors' Guide to Oral Argument," which I was given at the door. It continued, "Certain restrictions and requirements" are necessary to "maintain the atmosphere one might expect in the nation's highest court."

Some of these restrictions would make sense, particularly if the court did not subject each guest to airport-gate-like security measures at the door and post guards everywhere, but barring visitors from taking notes lacks justification.

Perhaps most unforgivable is the court's ban on tape recorders, which applies even to reporters on assignment, who are forced to try to transcribe the hearings in real time - a virtually impossible task. As the sole access to Supreme Court news for the vast majority of the population, they should be allowed to use devices that will help them get it right.

It's as if the court wants to limit the public's access to information about its proceedings. Even visiting in person does not guarantee access: The courtroom has only a few guest seats, and its floor-to-ceiling columns block many people's views.

If the Supreme Court truly were the people's court, it would care about public access. One tape recorder inside, for example, could create a low-cost Web audio archive, providing access to millions of virtual visitors without affecting the courtroom atmosphere.

Better still would be a video recording, which also could be streamed on-line. Unlike in trial-level cases, involving parties and witnesses whose privacy could be compromised by broadcasting proceedings, Supreme Court arguments involve only a couple of lawyers and nine justices, who probably don't want the public to watch as they fall asleep behind the bench.

Fortunately, the legislative and executive branches of the government are more enlightened than the judicial branch. Congress, the White House and executive agencies all post constantly updated information to the Web.

The Library of Congress (www.loc.gov), for example, provides an umbrella map to the vast range of executive and legislative materials available for free on-line. At the THOMAS Web site (thomas.loc.gov), you can read the text of all pending legislation and learn what is happening on the floor at any minute.

THOMAS also lets you track the status of any bill, tells you how Congress members voted and provides a complete Web version of the Congressional Record, updated daily.

At THOMAS, for instance, you can read the Senate's discussion about music in American culture on April 28, including the Marilyn Manson lyrics that were read on the floor. To help you voice your opinion, THOMAS links to directories of the House of Representatives (www.house.gov) and Senate (www.senate.gov) for contact information.

The recent surge in availability of government information on-line has revolutionized life for many people working on Capital Hill.

"I love the Internet," said Elisabeth Topel, a policy analyst at the Washington branch of Atlanta-based law firm Powell, Goldstein, Frazer & Murphy, whose practice includes lobbying politicians on behalf of its clients.

Topel's job involves researching and monitoring congressional and executive activity on a variety of public policy matters. For those tasks, no resource helps her more than the Web.

It it wasn't always that way.

"In the past, you had to know someone to gain access to this information," Topel said. "For example, congressional committees provide only 10 printed copies of an important document when at least 50 people want them. If you do not get one of those copies, you used to have to arrange for it to be photocopied and faxed or messengered to you," a time-consuming process, she said.

"If you needed something from a member of Congress, you would have to fax a request in the morning, then wait for the request to get to the correct staff members, who would fill the request when they got a chance, and eventually, hopefully, fax back a response. It could take all day."

Now, the information is on-line. Best of all, anyone can access it, not just those with the best personal connections. When you learn what is going on, she said, you see that a lot of it affects you, even if you work on the Internet and live in Silicon Valley.

For Internet-related issues, Topel points to the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee home page (www.netcaucus.org), which maintains a

To track policy affecting e-commerce, Topel recommends the E-Commerce Project (legal.web.aol.com / ecommerc), as well as the Federal Trade Commission's Web site (www.ftc.gov) and the Information Infrastructure Task Force (www.iitf.nist.gov).

Web sites that follow privacy issues and encryption policy include Americans for Computer Privacy (www.computerprivacy.com), The Center for Democracy and Technology (www.cdt.org) and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (www.epic.org).

Those sites, of course, only skim the surface of what is available. For more comprehensive indexes, check out Yahoo, Snap and other Web portal directories, as well as my favorite law-related Web site, Find Law (www.findlaw.com / 10fedgov). For the insatiable researcher, the Federal Gateway (fedgate.org) and the Federal Information Network (www.fedworld.gov) rival the Library of Congress (www.loc.gov) and THOMAS (thomas.loc.gov) in their comprehensiveness and complexity.

None of these Web sites, however, provides current records of arguments at the Supreme Court. For those, the closest you can get are audio recordings of oral arguments from prior years, which are archived by Oyez Project at Northwestern University (oyez.nwu.edu).

Even Oyez can't provide arguments from the current term. The Supreme Court releases all its audio materials to the National Archives in November following the term when the cases were heard. The National Archives makes them available to Oyez several months later.

As for written transcripts, forget it. They are not released in digital form.

With so much legislative and executive policy information on the Web, the lack of judicial information stands out. Perhaps the court thinks that the general public is too naive to understand its proceedings. If so, maintaining secrecy does little to educate the naive.

Fortunately, thanks to the information on the Web, we can write our elected officials to complain.

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